Google unveils new site to highlight open source projects and processes

Learn about Google's commitment to open source projects and communities.

Google has been a long time supporter of open source projects — the core software on your Android phone, for example, is open source and available for developers looking for a flexible, mobile OS.

Google has released millions of lines of open source code over the years and helped support thousands of open source projects, but until now there was no place to find all these projects under one umbrella website. Google announced today it has created a new website for Google Open Source projects.

The new site, opensource.google.com, offers a wealth of information, from Google's open source programs like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In to a comprehensive list of open source projects Google has released.

But it goes even deeper than that, as Google has also included its internal documentation for how Google does open source projects.

From the blog post:

These docs explain the process we follow for releasing new open source projects, submitting patches to others' projects, and how we manage the open source code that we bring into the company and use ourselves. But in addition to the how, it outlines why we do things the way we do, such as why we only use code under certain licenses or why we require contributor license agreements for all patches we receive.

If you're a developer looking for inspiration for a new project based on open source code, or simply curious to know the processes behind how communities come together to develop open source projects, this site is an absolute goldmine of information.